Anthony Eden was a british foreign secretary in 1935–38, 1940–45, and 1951–55 and prime minister from 1955 to 1957.
Background
Eden was born at Windlestone Hall, County Durham, England on 12 June 1897. He was born into a very conservative family of landed gentry. He was a younger son of Sir William Eden, 7th and 5th Baronet, a former colonel and local magistrate from an old titled family. Sir William, an eccentric and often foul-tempered man, was a talented watercolourist and collector of Impressionists.
Education
Eden was educated at two independent schools. The first was Sandroyd School in Cobham from 1907 to 1910, where he excelled in languages. He then started at Eton College in January 1911. There he won a Divinity prize and excelled at cricket, rugby and rowing, winning House colours in the last.
Eden learned French and German on continental holidays and as a child is said to have spoken French better than English. Although Eden was able to converse with Hitler in German in February 1934 and with the Chinese premier Chou En-lai in French at Geneva in 1954, he preferred to have interpreters to translate at formal meetings out of a sense of professionalism.
Career
After combat service in World War I, Eden studied Oriental languages (Arabic and Persian) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1923 and was appointed undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in 1931, lord privy seal (with special responsibility for international relations) in 1934, and minister for League of Nations affairs (a Cabinet office created for him) in June 1935. He became foreign secretary in December 1935 but resigned in February 1938 to protest Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
On the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Eden reentered Chamberlain’s government as dominions secretary. When Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, Eden was named secretary of state for war, but from Dec. 23, 1940, until the defeat of the Conservatives in July 1945, he served once more as foreign secretary. On Oct. 27, 1951, after Churchill and the Conservative Party had been returned to power, Eden again became foreign secretary and also was designated deputy prime minister. In 1954 he helped to settle the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute, to resolve the quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia over Trieste, to stop the Indochina War, and to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
In 1953 he became seriously ill, and, although he underwent several operations, he never fully regained his health. Succeeding Churchill as prime minister on April 6, 1955, he attempted to relax international tension by welcoming to Great Britain the Soviet leaders N.S. Khrushchev and N.A. Bulganin. His fall began on July 26, 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, head of the Egyptian state, nationalized the Suez Canal Company, in which the British government had been a principal stockholder since 1875. This action led to an Anglo-French attack on Egypt on November 5, one week after an attack on Egypt by Israel.
British public opinion was more favourable to Eden’s show of force than the Labour and Liberal parties had expected; his supporters regretted, however, that he did not fulfill his intention of occupying the key positions of Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez. By December 22, partly through U.S. pressure, British and French forces had been supplanted by UN emergency units, but the canal was left in Egyptian hands rather than subjected to international control. The next month, on Jan. 9, 1957, Eden resigned, giving ill health as his reason.
Politics
Although Eden later claimed to have had no interest in politics until the early 1920s, his teenage letters and diaries show him to have been obsessed with the subject. He was a strong, partisan Conservative, rejoicing in the defeat of Charles Masterman at a by-election (May 1913) and once astonishing his mother on a train journey by telling her the MP and the size of his majority for each constituency through which they passed. By 1914 he was a member of the Eton Society ("Pop").
Personality
Eden, who was well-mannered, well-groomed, and good-looking, always made a particularly cultured appearance. This gave him huge popular support throughout his political life, but some contemporaries felt he was merely a superficial person lacking any deeper convictions.
That view was enforced by his very pragmatic approach to politics.
Eden was heavily influenced by Stanley Baldwin when he first entered Parliament. After earlier combative beginnings, he cultivated a low-key speaking style which relied heavily on rational argument and consensus-building rather than rhetoric and party point-scoring, and which was often highly effective in the House of Commons. However, he was not always an effective public speaker, and his parliamentary performances sometimes disappointed many of his followers.
Eden's inability to express himself clearly is often attributed to shyness and lack of self-confidence. Eden is known to have been much more direct in meeting with his secretaries and advisers than in Cabinet meetings and public speeches, and sometimes tended to become enraged and behave "like a child", only to regain his temper within a few minutes. Many who worked for him remarked that he was "two men", one charming, erudite, and hard-working, the other petty and prone to temper tantrums during which he would insult his subordinates.
Physical Characteristics:
Eden had an ulcer, exacerbated by overwork, as early as the 1920s. His life was changed by a medical mishap: during an operation on 12 April 1953, to remove gallstones, his bile duct was damaged, leaving Eden susceptible to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, and liver failure. The physician consulted at the time was the royal physician, Sir Horace Evans, 1st Baron Evans. Three surgeons were recommended and Eden chose the one that had previously performed his appendicectomy, John Basil Hume, surgeon from St Bartholomew's Hospital. Eden suffered from cholangitis, an abdominal infection which became so agonising that he was admitted to hospital in 1956 with a temperature reaching 106 °F (41 °C). He required major surgery on three or four occasions to alleviate the problem.
Quotes from others about the person
Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, said he never understood why Eden was so strongly pushed by the Tory party, as he felt that Eden's abilities were very much inferior to those of Harold Macmillan and Oliver Stanley.
In 1947, Dick Crossman called Eden "that peculiarly British type, the idealist without conviction".
US Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarded Eden as a quite old-fashioned amateur in politics typical of the British Establishment. In contrast, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev commented that until his Suez adventure Eden had been "in the top world class".
Churchill once even commented on one of Eden's speeches that the latter had used every cliché except "God is love".
Connections
On 5 November 1923 he married Beatrice Beckett, then aged only 18. They had three sons: Simon Gascoigne (1924–1945), Robert, who died fifteen minutes after being born in October 1928, and Nicholas (1930–1985). The marriage was not a success, with both parties apparently conducting affairs. By the mid-1930s his diaries seldom mention Beatrice. The marriage finally broke up under the strain of the loss of their son Simon.
In 1950, Eden and Beatrice were finally divorced, and in 1952, he married Churchill's niece Clarissa Spencer-Churchill. Eden's second marriage was much more successful than his first had been.